We use cookies in order to provide you with the best possible user experience on our websites. By continuing to use our sites and services, you are giving consent to cookies being used. You can find more information in our data privacy statement.

Why Agents Hate Coming to Work

It’s
amazing how many jobs I had as a student that prepared me for life as a contact
center analyst. One was international operator for AT&T. There was a lot of
manual dialing, typically punching in up to 15 or 20 digits. It could be quite
frustrating trying to find information for a customer, which often involved
flipping through pages of manuals and little handwritten notes.

I also spent time as a market research interviewer. At the
beginning of a shift, you would be handed a list of phone numbers. Or worse, it
was random digit dialing and you were just given a number to start with.
Although some surveys were automated, many were still paper and pencil,
requiring you to jump around from page to page depending on the answers to
certain questions.

Compared to
the life of an agent in the 1970s, the veritable dawn of the call center era,
agents today would seem to have an easy life. Numbers are automatically dialed
from targeted lists, computers make searching for information much easier than
scanning page after page, and programming automatically brings agents to the
next field that must be populated on a form.

The problem
is that today’s primarily millennial and Gen X agent workforce is not comparing
their work environment to the earliest days of ACDs. They can’t understand why
they have to drive to a building and sit in a certain chair in a certain room
with dozens of others to work on a computer. They don’t know why it isn’t
easier to find the information customers ask them for. They want to say “yes”
not “I don’t have the ability to do that with my system” when customers ask for
an email or text message for the information that needs to be conveyed. They
are comparing the experience working on your agent desktop to the latest
popular collaboration application, like Snapchat on their just-got-yesterday
iPhone.

The biggest
issue, however, is that agents understand that a lot of the frustrations of
their daily lives don’t need to be that way. Unlike my work life as a
pre-personal computer market research interviewer, there is no logical or
technical reason that agents can’t have a better work experience. As an
industry, we talk a lot about the customer journey and perhaps not enough about
the agent experience.

We’ll
discuss the laundry list of complaints that agents have about their work
life…and what relatively easy steps can be taken to turn their frowns into
smiles. And we all know customers can hear those smiles.